singing the net

Before I saw Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin's current video installation at Yerba Buena I had no idea that Indian casinos extend their reach to the online realm in addition to their presence in the physical.  The French artists focus on the Quebec reservation of Kahnawake, home to a Mohawk tribe of Canadian First Nations people as well as computer servers that host over 300 online casinos.  Bernier and Martin cleverly play with stereotypes both old and new in their work, playing a video of a young child absorbing footage depicting Native Americans from Disney's Pinocchio right next to clips from their film New Kahnawake / La Nouvelle Kahnawaké in which Bernier has his hair shorn into a hipsterish mohawk before having his face daubed with blue war paint.  The pair also juxtapose the blatant tech-savviness of San Francisco with the more behind-the-scenes web activities of Kahanwake in a slideshow of snapshots from both locations, and I smiled at the pic they managed to grab of a car on SF's Market Street with a giant old-fashioned canoe strapped to its roof.  I also like how Bernier and Martin highlight the changing meaning of borders in our internet age, where a server physically located on a reservation can provide gaming opportunities for anyone in the world, in the comfort of their own home.  They leave the question of whether that is a positive development open to the viewer's interpretation.